Earthworm

By Stuart Gelzer

On the surface EARTHWORM is a genre-blurring social satire of life in a comically absurd and economically collapsed post-Soviet dictatorship-a world of public doll burnings, a government campaign to suppress foreign music, a no-budget exploitation movie about medieval knights and modern gangsters... all the usual goings-on. The story revolves ar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bertie Stanhope Press
• Release date: May 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987808115

Stuart Gelzer

Stuart Gelzer, the child of American missionaries, grew up in Cameroon and India. Over the years he's been a screenwriter, a film editor, a drama teacher, a film and photography teacher, and a singer specializing in folk music from the Republic of Georgia. Nowadays he does fine-art photography, writes fiction and travel memoir, and translates old French popular novels. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Copyright © 2023 by Stuart Gelzer

Cover design by Stuart Gelzer

Published by Bertie Stanhope Press

ISBN 979-8-218-07285-8

ISBN 979-8-987-80811-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022916899

A portion of this work (Dolls) first appeared, in slightly different form, in The Carolina Quarterly.

The author owes a debt to Hergé for several visual ideas, as well as gratitude and apologies to Paata Tediashvili, for his music video for the song Bindisperia Sopeli.

For Olivia, its muse.

TUREK

VOLAD

NACHTIGAL

TUREK

1. DOLLS

THOUGH HE didn’t know it when he set off for work, Turek had already lost his job. No one had the decency or common sense to call him at home and save him the trip across town (two marshrutkas, both crowded). When he got to the Polytechnic they said they’d been too overwhelmed to think of it, what with everything, blah blah blah, though they were all just sitting around in the staff office watching some glitter-covered Kazakh rapper on YouTube—trying to suck up as much Internet as their heads could hold before someone came and repossessed the computers.

Apparently once the head of the Polytechnic had collected all of this fall’s tuition (U.S. dollars, cash only, please!), he put it in a suitcase and left for Germany. When Turek asked, Wouldn’t he get stopped at the airport? the young people looked up from the screen and smiled condescendingly and said, Turek, Turek! and rubbed their fingers and thumbs together like carpet merchants—but if these kids were so cool and in the know, what were they still doing here?

They went back to watching the Kazakh video, their faces bathed in golden light, and Turek stood there long enough for them to have forgotten him. Then he asked, So how do I get paid for the weeks I taught so far? and they didn’t say anything, though one of the young women laughed, maybe at the music video. Because he couldn’t seem to stop himself from asking dumb questions, he said, Has anyone notified the students? This time all of them looked up and laughed, and the skinny guy whose name he couldn’t remember said, Hey, good idea, Turek, why don’t you go down the hall and break the news to your class?

It was class time, but in the room where he’d been teaching this semester he saw only two students, and they were sitting on a desk kissing. Turek said, Excuse me. They kept going awhile, and when they stopped they looked annoyed. Are we bothering you, Dad? When he told them the Polytechnic was closed the girl said, What Polytechnic? So apparently everybody had figured it out except him.

Leaving the dim urine-scented lobby, Turek pushed open the heavy front door that still said Twenty-First Century Polytechnic and went down the wide uneven broken stairs, rusty rebar poking through the gaps in the marble here and there. He stepped back onto the curb to dodge a clanging streetcar, and decided to save his return marshrutka money and go home on foot: after all, what was there to hurry for now?

As he walked along Young Pioneer Avenue—it had a new name, but he couldn’t recall it—he pictured his mother, poor woman, all those decades ago in another and simpler world, writing carefully on the title page of the yellowing old book that was to be his graduation present, Remember, now and always, the door to the future stands wide open before you!

Of course, when she said things like that his mother couldn’t imagine the real future, the one in which her beloved Soviet Union fell, first to its knees, then onto its face, then into a dozen bleeding amputated fragments—nor could she imagine that her clean shiny son, the pride of the V. I. Lenin Central School, would grow up to mimic the Soviet Union in everything short of the dismemberment (so far). Maybe it was a good thing his mother, taken from him so suddenly, hadn’t lived to see him in the full fruit of his manhood: desperately clinging to his last few remaining strands of hair, inexplicably bony and a little bit potbellied at the same time, forever exploring the gaps left by a couple of strategically missing teeth (all the dentists seemed to have left for Brighton Beach), still short of fifty, and now walking home jobless.

In the days that followed, with the hours now heavy on his hands, Turek took his lirubej down off the wall for the first time in more than a year. As he tuned the strings to their imperfect ratios—a process that by itself took almost half an hour and that some days, especially when he was discouraged, expanded to fill the whole of his practice time—he tried to put aside the nagging question of how, in this cursed part of the world, at this cursed moment in history, he was going to find another job. He reminded himself that he’d been out of work before, and that he’d landed more or less on his feet before—though sometimes on hot coals.

It used to be, when he was younger, you could blame the government, the economy, and the collapse of the Union— always and above all the collapse of the Union!—but these days he felt like the Little Father was already doing everything humanly possible. And in the end what could you do, what could anyone do, about a scoundrel like the head of the Polytechnic? Turek was fairly sure things like that happened everywhere.

When he finally found a good enough tuning, or just gave up trying, and picked up the short high-arched bow and began to saw, filling his gloomy apartment with the equally gloomy sound of the lirubej, he could be sure the music would soon be accompanied by angry thumping on the floor of the apartment overhead. The first time he played, a day or two after losing his job, the dragon auntie upstairs actually came down in her pink house dress and slippers and complained.

Holding his front door open without inviting her in, Turek said, Don’t you appreciate your own folk music?

She left the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and smoke eddied around her lips as she spoke. Is that what it is? It sounds more like you’re trying to kill something and you can’t finish it off.

Turek could have sat her down and played her his copies of precious scratchy village field recordings from as far back as 1902 to show her he was doing it right, but he knew that was a waste of time, so he just said, This is exactly how the lirubej is supposed to sound.

She laughed in his face, a strangely mannish smoker’s laugh. So I guess that means I can’t even look forward to improvement. After that when he began to practice she made a big show of stomping around overhead slamming all the windows.

On the mornings when he didn’t feel like playing the lirubej, Turek found himself lying on the old couch out on the glassed-in balcony that overlooked the inner courtyard of the apartment block—what Masha had always called the sunroom—watching television. And as often as not, that meant rewatching A Child of the People. He knew it was corny, and he knew it came on at least once a week, but if he stumbled onto it by accident, even halfway through, when he was switching channels to get away from all the commercials for things he couldn’t afford— Japanese whiskey, high-speed Internet, facelifts—on Durma’s morning talk show, somehow he was hooked, helpless, every time.

It wasn’t enough that the story was great, unforgettable, but on top of that the large-eyed actor who played the Little Father as a child was incredible. This time Turek arrived in the middle of the scene where the boy destined for greatness inspired the rest of the orphanage to band together and rise up. What this orphanage needs—what this country needs—what the whole world needs—is not more food but more love! And the other boys, most of them bigger than the hero, because he was just an urchin, but they knew a leader when they saw one, they DID need food and a bath and justice in general, but they knew he was right: above all they needed love. And right on cue Turek had tears in his eyes. It was brilliant.

At that point Volad called. When Turek told him what he was doing Volad said, Stop watching that shit! You’re pathetic! You need to quit lapping up the Little Fucker’s caca and get outside so you can stop feeling sorry for yourself.

So after arguing awhile—but he should have known better by now than to try to argue with Volad, who had five answers to every question—Turek got up and took a long, slow walk (still saving his marshrutka money) through the endless rows of identical gray apartment blocks and down the winding tree-lined avenue to the Old City and then up through the twisting alleyways and the street of stairs to Volad’s house. When he couldn’t find him on the main floor or the second floor—where he remembered to keep one cautious eye on the missing planking—he knew where Volad was. He called up the stairs to the roof, I’m not coming up there!

Yes, you are! The view’s beautiful, the air feels great, and it’s feeding time!

So Turek climbed the stairs to the flat roof, where Volad was just putting on his glove, like a big leather oven mitt. The air was fresh, almost cold when the breeze came down the big hill, and the sun hitting the Hall of the People across the river gave it a glow that made it look even more than usual like a spaceship just landed. (People said that mockingly, but Turek didn’t: he’d always liked spaceships.)

He told Volad again how much the birds gave him the creeps, and Volad called him a pussy as usual. Turek didn’t mind heights, but he did mind being far above the ground while sharing a small flat rooftop with two vultures that came up to his waist. Volad had told him they weren’t vultures, they were Caspian falcons, and they didn’t eat carrion, they hunted, but Turek still called them vultures to annoy him.

While Turek stood as far away as he could without falling off the edge of the roof, Volad opened the big chicken-wire cage and somehow got the first bird to perch on his glove. Turek could see how deep the bird’s talons sank into the leather. As Volad pulled his arm back out through the door of the cage the falcon made a leap for freedom—but Volad had some strap that was attached to its foot already looped around his wrist, so the bird just fell down and hung from his arm.

Turek said, If you got two gloves you could have one bird in each hand, and I bet they could carry you halfway across town.

Volad laughed. Not this fat boy!

It was true: Volad was probably a hundred kilos heavier than twenty years ago, at the height of his minor rock-star fame. And you could still see his unbelievably younger, slimmer self dancing around the stage in a tight pearl-gray three-piece suit and skinny black tie in those videos for his band, Desalination. Of course you couldn’t see them on local television anymore, not since the rock-music ban, but they were still available on YouTube. But the new Volad, fat bearded Volad with a hobby raising vultures, was not to be found these days on TV or any stage besides the roof of his house.

Volad put the first bird into a box with holes, sort of like a beehive, and slammed the door shut, and then went back and got the second bird. This one was calmer coming out of the cage —no escape attempt—but when he tried to put it into its box it fought like crazy. Suddenly there were wings and talons and beaks everywhere. Turek knew the birds were hooded and couldn’t see what was going on, and he was well out of range, but he had to fight the impulse to jump off the roof and take his chances. Somehow Volad kept the thing away from his face and stuffed it into the box and slammed the door. This one he put a bungee cord around for good measure. Then they stood and looked at the two boxes.

Turek said, Are you selling them already?

Volad laughed a huge laugh and started rubbing his beard. Oh my God, Turek, I haven’t told you! And then, laughing all the way through, he explained his new business plan. Apparently there were rich foreigners who were crazy about birds—any birds, not just these horrible vultures but the kind of stupid little brown birds that to Turek were not just creepy but boring, like weeds. These incomprehensible people collected birds, but they didn’t shoot them and stuff them, they just took pictures of them—or sometimes even just spotted them through binoculars and checked off the name in a book, and that counted. And some of those people had seen all the birds in their own country—all the birds in America!—and were bored and wanted to go somewhere else far away and see the birds there and check them off in a different book. At that point Volad stopped and looked at Turek like he was supposed to guess the rest.

Turek said, So it turns out there are even more ways for a rich person to be an idiot than I knew. And?…

Volad laughed. "Turek, you know what my motto is, what it’s been since the Desalination days:

He is happy who pleases the powerful,

And avoids being squashed underfoot."

Yeah, you’ve said that before… is that by the Little Father?

Good God, no! It’s Omar Khayyam or Tamerlane or one of those guys.

Whatever. Okay, so then what: you’re going to bring the rich Americans up to your roof to look at your vultures?

Volad slapped his forehead. Turek, Turek, that is not the bold imaginative thinking the Little Fucker is calling for to lead this country into the future!

Stop calling him that, especially out here on the roof where all the neighbors can hear you.

Fuck the neighbors too, nothing but beaten-down peasants.

Both of them knew their political arguments went nowhere, so after a little disapproving silence Turek said, Okay, about the birds.

Volad explained: Groups of rich foreign birders would pay thousands of dollars to come to this country and be taken out on a birding tour, like a safari without the wildebeest. Volad would run the website designed to lure them in and get their money through PayPal. And then when they got here he would guide them. If it was a small enough group he could fit them all in his old Niva and save the cost of renting another vehicle. He would drive them all over the country—well, only as far as the edge of the restricted zone, of course—and show them birds, and they would take pictures and make lists and be orgasmic.

Turek said it sounded like a really great business plan, but what about the vultures?

Turek, these rich birders may sound like idiots, but remember, they’re rich, so they’re actually more careful with their money than you are. (Turek doubted the American bird nuts were walking everywhere these days to save the marshrutka fare, but he didn’t say so.) So they’re not going to hand thousands of dollars to some fat guy online with a funny name from a little country that also has a funny name without some kind of guarantee: they will see rare local birds or get their money back, period.

You made that guarantee?

It’s on the website, the very first screen, in big letters.

By now Turek was totally confused. But they’re not going to count coming up on your roof—

Turek, you don’t get it, just listen. Twenty, thirty years ago, it would’ve been no problem. There were exotic native birds everywhere—in the hills, along the river bottom, in the desert. But thanks to the Little… He stopped himself from adding the second word. Look, I don’t care whose side you’re on, you can’t live here and not be aware of what’s happened— And Turek didn’t really have to listen while Volad ran through his usual litany: the slopes eroded by deforestation, rivers dammed and poisoned by runoff, lakes drained down to salt flats to irrigate cash crops, all the environmental degradation Turek was tired of hearing the Little Father blamed for. Long story short, the birds are gone.

I see birds on the street all the time.

Turek, those are fucking sparrows. You think birders want to pay to come here to see the same birds they could see in Chicago? Volad put the big glove back on. The falcons are going to travel to the desert in these boxes, so they need to associate going into the box with being fed, so now I’ll feed them. Turek retreated to the edge of the roof. But as Volad brought the birds out one by one and carried them back to the chicken wire cage, they sat still and calm on his arm. You see? They know dinner’s coming. They have no reason to fly away now.

When both falcons were back inside, Volad got an old coffee can full of disgusting, half-rotted meat—chicken necks, he said —and started throwing chunks through the open door of the cage. The birds, still hooded, found the meat by smell (and maybe the wet sound of it hitting the ground) and began to attack it so eagerly that Turek could barely watch. Volad closed and locked the door with a serious padlock. Can’t afford to have someone walk off with them. These are very expensive birds—maybe fewer than a hundred mating pairs in the wild.

And you could afford to buy them?

Volad laughed. I traded away my future earthquake survivor benefits to someone stupid enough to think they’re ever going to get paid. Volad maintained that the Little Father’s vow to pay benefits to people whose entire family had died in the earthquake was a big joke. But the Little Father himself had been orphaned at the age of five by an earlier earthquake—it was a harrowing scene near the beginning of A Child of the People, and the special effects were pretty good, especially for a movie made locally—so Turek believed him when he said no tragedy was closer to his heart. Some things just took time.

By now the birds had eaten everything and were attacking the bare boards to be sure. So it works like this. I drive these foreigners around the country. We probably see nothing, and they get more and more impatient. On the last day I take them to the edge of the desert, a place I say is reputed to be good, though I myself have never had any luck birding there. I tell them I don’t want to jinx their luck, I’m going to have a smoke where I won’t bother them. I go around the dune to where these beauties are waiting in their boxes. I release them, they fly around, I call them back—

Wouldn’t the birdwatchers hear your call?

It’s an arm signal, not a sound. Then I go back after my smoke and discover that my American friends have seen and positively identified and even photographed the endangered Caspian falcon! On their last day! They’re elated, ecstatic, they stuff hundred-dollar bills into my shirt pocket! They’ll tell all their birdwatching friends to come! Volad laughed and laughed.

Turek said, I want to be encouraging, but I have to be honest and tell you I think it’s a really stupid idea. It’s not going to work.

It’s going to work, because I’m just letting them believe something they’re already desperate to believe—that they came all this way and saw a rare bird no one else they know has seen. They’re going to do all the work for me, trust me—it’s exactly like rock music.

Well, I don’t know anything about rock music, but I don’t think anyone is even going to sign up on your website.

Volad smiled a big smile and rubbed his beard. The first group arrives next week, on the two a.m. flight from Istanbul. He looked at Turek thoughtfully. I’ll be sleeping. You want to meet the flight?

I’ll be sleeping too, and anyway I’m not sure I want to be mixed up in your criminal enterprise.

I’ll pay you.

Let’s see how desperate I am next week.

Every man has his price.

The morning news showed the Little Father visiting a nursery school, and in the middle of an anecdote about his childhood in the orphanage he noticed that some girl in the audience was holding a Russian doll. Glaring down at her he said, I thought we sent all the Russians home. Then, right there on the podium, he decreed that from now on all dolls would have to look like the people—hair, skin, eyes—and would have to wear the national costume. No little girl is going to be carrying around and hugging a foreign interloper—we’re going to have sovereign dolls for a sovereign nation!

By the next morning the news showed people out on the street throwing blond, pink-cheeked dolls into big bonfires. They were shouting and laughing as they did it, and Turek was pretty excited too, just watching from his couch, because it was a perfect example of the way the Little Father cut through a problem and led the way forward and the people rallied around him—though Turek was a little taken aback when the TV showed a closeup, and it looked like a huge pile of little girls with their hair on fire and their faces melting.

He got up and took his lirubej off the wall. This time he wasn’t even done tuning all the strings before the dragon auntie came downstairs and started knocking. But when he opened his door, instead of yelling at him about the noise she said, What are you doing here in the middle of the day? Don’t you have a job at some college? For a moment Turek was puzzled: he’d been out of work for weeks already, practicing the lirubej in the mornings, and only now she wondered why? But then, thinking about the impulse that had made him reach for the comfort of the wood and lambskin of the instrument, he decided she was here because of the burning dolls.

He explained about the Polytechnic, and she clucked sympathetically. Then, since she remained there in the doorway looking past him as if she wanted to come in, he invited her to have a cup of green tea. She sat at the little chipped Formica table where the kitchen opened onto the sunroom, in her pink house dress and slippers, slurping loudly from a flower-patterned cup.

It was the first time he’d seen her anyplace other than the gloomy stairwell of the building, and now in the bright morning light flooding in from the courtyard Turek thought she looked like a scary cartoon character, with those ridiculous fake eyebrows painted about five centimeters above where her real eyebrows would be if they hadn’t been plucked bald. Her hair, too, was a phenomenon: a stiff irregular henna thatch that looked not so much dyed as cauterized.

She seemed to be staring at the lirubej, propped up on the decaying sunroom couch, and Turek kept waiting for her to make some crack about it, again with the animals being slowly killed, but finally she took her cigarette out of her mouth and said, They say, if we lose our music we’ll lose our souls.

It was like he was performing in a play and another actor had stolen his line: Turek was so surprised that he couldn’t think of anything to say, and the dragon auntie just kept going, almost heatedly, as if he was daring to disagree with her and she had to correct him firmly. Yes, yes! Our music, the music of our people—it’s our priceless heritage! It’s all we’ve got! It’s priceless! Because, when you think about it, what else do we have? She kept waiting for him to disagree, and when he didn’t she just came back at him anyway as if he had. It’s ours—all ours! And what else can you say that about?

What could she possibly know, to hold forth on the subject of folk music like this? Turek found everything about the dragon auntie irritating, even her smell—she smelled soapy in a way that, paradoxically, made her seem dirtier, because if she were a clean person why would she need so much soap?—and he wished she would finish slurping her tea and go away, but on top of everything else it was just too much to bear to listen to her preaching the gospel of folk music. He drew himself up and said, I may be a physicist by profession,—here he got a little distracted remembering he’d never actually had a job in a field that could strictly be called physics—but our folk music has been my lifelong passion.

She nodded. Mine too.

What was this, a contest? But now she’d gone too far, and he had her cornered. You told me you hated the lirubej—you came down here and said it sounded like a dying animal.

She looked a little sheepish. I used to like Russian pop. But the Little Father says now we need to respect and cherish our own culture, our sovereign culture. The dolls are only the beginning. Turek said nothing, remembering the melting faces on TV. She went on, Anyway, when I was a girl we used to visit my grandmother in her village in the mountains. She always sang, so that counts, doesn’t it? She even taught me a song I think I still remember. Little bits of it come back to me now and then. Shall I sing it for you?

Turek lied and said he’d be honored, and she got coy and shy. I don’t know if I can do it after so long. She pointed to the lirubej. Help me out on that thing. He picked it up and got ready to play. Some of the strings had already fallen out of tune, but he knew it didn’t matter. He had a pretty good idea what was coming next, and sure enough: after a smoker’s phlegmy throat-clearing, the dragon auntie, in a really awful gaspy vibrato, began to croon that good old ‘Farmer’s Lament,’ the one folk song everybody knew.

She didn’t even make it all the way through the first verse, drifting off into a murmur after I’ll be dead before dawn, which was all right with Turek, and he didn’t tell her it wasn’t really a folk song—and certainly not an example of the priceless heritage of the people—since it was a piece of cheese cooked up by someone at the State Radio in about 1955. (In a daring move for that time, the blessings of collectivization weren’t mentioned till verse two, which nobody except Turek remembered.)

When the dragon auntie in her dangling slippers and perpetually shocked eyebrows and stained pink house dress had given up singing, and Turek had brought the first verse to a decent end in the lirubej part, she sniffled and said, It makes me feel like a little girl again.

He knew what she meant: somehow the song—in spite of the fakery of its origins and the awfulness of her delivery—had rubbed away some kind of ugly shell and left her more exposed. Or maybe it was his own shell that had come partway off.

She sniffled again. Where did the years go? How did I become this?

He had no answer—did anyone?—and the two of them sat there, Turek underscoring the melancholy silence by absently touching the strings in the fingering for ‘Farmer’s Lament.’

Since even he couldn’t watch TV or practice the lirubej all day, Turek filled many of his newly empty hours taking long walks. He generally followed the road that wound along the contour of the big hill, and—since he was a sedentary, bookish man, and not accustomed to all this walking—he stopped fairly often to admire the view of the city and rest his sore feet.

Beyond the usual wave after wave of crumbling old gray Soviet apartment blocks, the kind that had spent their whole lives looking simultaneously half built and half falling down, Turek noticed that more and more the tone of the skyline was set by the Little Father's new landmark projects: the Voice of the People Opera House, the Glorious National Mother women’s hospital, the World Tolerance Bridge.

And then he imagined those monuments looking back across the roofs of the city at him, standing there on a path halfway up the big hill: a jobless orphaned cast-off middle-aged man, his eyes moist with pride at how far his country had come in the decades since it hit rock bottom in the chaos surrounding the fall of the last Soviet commissar and the rise of the Little Father.

When his feet told him they’d had enough, Turek turned downhill and went home in a more or less straight line, through the steep streets and staircases of the Old City, telling himself each time that it should be possible to enjoy the twisting alleyways and the ornate balconies and the smell of wood smoke without giving in to the temptation to step into a café and spend his marshrutka money.

On the way home from his walk the day after he and the dragon auntie had sat and sung together, as Turek passed one of the nicest old houses in the Old City—the kind tucked so tightly into the nest of other houses on a really narrow street that it was almost impossible to step back far enough to see and appreciate the whole—he noticed a shiny new brass sign next to the door: ISEF, the International Scholarship and Exchange Foundation. Turek checked to make sure he was wearing decent clothes, and he was, so he went up the steep steps and pushed open the heavy door.

Most of the places in the Old City, even the grandest ones where from the street you thought you’d give anything to live there, turned out to be falling down from the inside out. Volad’s house, for example, bought long ago in his flush Desalination days: a historic address, an amazing view over the old higgledy-piggledy rooftops, but it had gaps here and there in the ancient wooden walls big enough to put an arm through, and gaps in the floor in some of the rooms overhanging the street of stairs, so you could look straight down between your feet at the tired old grannies climbing the stone steps on their way back from the bazaar.

But as he entered the mysterious office Turek’s first impression was of rich Turkish carpet, dark ornate chairs and divans grouped around a brass tea set, and surprising insulation from the sounds of the street: a high-quality renovation and rescue of this great old house. So whatever ISEF was, it had money and taste. And it had the usual cute and sparkly just-graduated English major sitting at a more or less empty desk. Behind her through an open door Turek could see part of another desk but not the occupant.

He asked the girl what ISEF did, and she said they provided scholarships for study abroad. But when he told her he was interested in applying she just tittered and glanced toward the inner office. She tried